Review for OWL

This is a review for Uli Sattler’s article on OWL the Web Ontology language. The title “OWL” looks a little strange in the table of contents, so I’d be inclined to change it to “The Web Ontology Language (OWL)”. Most of my comments are at this level, so indicates that the article is fine. I have only a few other comments.

As a background to how OWL works this K-Blog works for me. This article takes the reader on an introductory tour of OWL. It gives a genral background on OWL. It concentrates on the reasoning side of OWL – what a reasoner does. A few lines of introduction to say what the purpose the article is and what it wil not do would be useful. for instance, a guide to OWL exspressivity and modelling tips for OWL is not the purpose of this article. A link to Phil Lord’s KBlog on components and Matt Horridge’s on OWL syntax would be good.

Whilst OWL is probably the most prominent ontology language of the moment, within the biology context that is the topic of the Ontogenesis Kblog, the OBOF format should be mentioned (along with a link to the OBOF K-Blog). In this community, OBOF is very widely used and this should be acknowledged.

It would be useful to give a simple statement of what an axiom is. The word “model” and its meaning within the DL world may need more attention as well (or a warning to just overlook it). Model is used in this community in its much more general sense.

“where OWL and reasoning is used purely to make sure that the things said about classes and the resulting entailed class hierarchy are correct” – Is OWL natively used in SnoMED? I thought it used a DL, but not OWL as such. Also, “correct” needs care as it is checked for logical correctnesss rather than domain of interest correctnerss.

Minor:

• “are important: OWL comes in” → sentence change instead of colon.
• “, properties, and inviduals” → individuals
• “chose whatever relation you like” → choose
• “help us unterstand ” → understand
• “Coming back to Protege” → new paragraph at onset of this sentence.
• “currently recides in” → resides
• “Both have clearly advantages ” clearly have

reviewed by robert Stevens

School of Computer Science, University of Manchester.